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Space Colonies - A CoEvolution Book

Most of this book is Used Information. It is reprinted from various issues of The CoEvolution Quarterly, a California-based peculiar magazine.

You can look at that news two ways. If you operate by the Bread Model of Information, it's terrible news. You've been gypped - stale information.

On the other hand if you view information as something fundamentally different from bread, there's the possibility of good news. Having lived longer, the information here may be wiser, more co-evolved with the world. It may be more refined, having cycled complexly through the minds and responses of 40,000 CQ readers. And it's been through two editorial distillations; the less-than-wonderful and out-of-date may have been extracted.

Also, being linked up with a magazine, the book does not stop here. The Space Debate continues in the CQ, and you're invited to participate with comments, item suggestions and reviews, and articles. Send them to The CoEvolution Quarterly, Box 428, Sausalito, Cahfornia 94965. We pay $10- $200 for anything we publish, including letters.

If you are a regular CQ subscriber you'll be glad to know that about 20% - some 32 pages - of this book is brand new (1977) material which hasn't appeared in the magazine and won't. This includes most of the book reviews, the Governor Jerry Brown material, two Eric Drexler articles, and the two most recent interviews with Space Colony designer Gerard O'Neill and astronaut Russell Schweickart.

The book is organized into three sections - Vision, Debate, and Space. The Vision is Gerard O'Neill's domain - progressing from broad propaganda to technical details to anecdotes. The Debate section is probably the most unique to this book since no one else has published the highly intelligent attacks that have been stung into life by the Space Colony idea. And the third section - Space - is natural history, accounts from people such as astronaut Sch weickart and space scien tist Sagan and politician Brown. Finishing, if you please, on a note of reality.

By the way, "co-evolution" is a term of recent coinage, co-conceived by biologists Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven to explain something terribly obvious but not before formally recognized about living organisms. They spend most of their adaptive effort getting along with other life which is likewise busily competing, cooperating, and avoiding at them. Life co-evolves with life.

That includes us. So as you study your work, your yard, your watershed, your bio-community and human community, your weather, your access to tools, your night sky, and your prospects in Space, be aware that they are studying you.